


(I Wish I Was) Marked By You

by wickedwriter916



Series: Words Roll Off Your Tongue [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Budapest, Cold!Natasha, F/M, Natasha-centric, Origin Stories, Pre-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Red Room, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, prequel as sequel, young!Clint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-13
Updated: 2016-07-13
Packaged: 2018-07-23 17:22:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7472898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wickedwriter916/pseuds/wickedwriter916
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the early days he still had charm, it seemed to be something they couldn't wash out of him. "Dance for me, Natalia.” </p><p>She's heard of these markings and knows that if they allowed her to have one, her body would display his words, his name (she isn't sure how this all works she knows that it's him).</p><p>“Watch me.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	(I Wish I Was) Marked By You

**Author's Note:**

> So this has been a little more than two years in the making ( the first was written the night before my daughter was born, and chapter two in the weeks after her father died). Here is how Natasha met Clint.

Belief and knowledge are two sides of the same coin. Faith and Science. Intuition and evidence.

 

 

In the early days he still had charm, it seemed to be something they couldn't wash out of him. "Dance for me, Natalia.”

 

She's heard of these markings and knows that if they allowed her to have one, her body would display his words, his name (she isn't sure how this all works she knows that it's him).

 

She was eleven. Her parents were gone, and he was older (so much older) but she knew that he is the one.

 

“Watch me.”

 

\--

 

Madame has been especially hard on them this week. She and Yelena spend almost every waking hour while in training trying to maim, dismember and cripple each other; they glare across the table during their sparse meals, but alternate between pilfering ice from the kitchen and standing guard outside of the shower room so that the other can soak sore muscles away in a meager ice bath.

 

By week’s end they know why.

 

Their test has arrived. Natalia is selected to go first and she nearly kills the man but for a glint of metal and a harsh voice instructing her to dance.

 

It is the only time that she fails an assignment.

 

\--

 

A year later, when she graduates the program at sixteen she is given her first assignment: a target and a contact.

 

Yasha. She finally has a name for the man who holds her words.

 

She does not get an opportunity to inspect him, but her curiosity does nothing but burn in the depth of her soul as she eliminates her target without prejudice.

 

When she returns to him her words are raw and bold, positioned neat and orderly down the front of his bicep.

 

She wonders aloud when she will get his words and where they will be; he is silent.

 

\--

 

They kill a lot of people. The son of a former Lebanese president, a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, a slew of political figureheads in Istanbul and a Russian separatist president, notably. They take no pleasure in it, but suffer no remorse for it. Such is their lives. Follow orders (blindly) and complete the mission (nothing else).

 

She grows into her body, and he gradually stops fighting her advances.

 

She swirls and dips, moves as he guides her, their puppet strings never tangling (not like the sheets around their sweaty forms). They glide and writhe in elegant cold violence (he likes when she gouges, she likes that he chokes), move with synchronous savagery at the command of their leaders; one perfectly in tune with the other.

 

\--

 

It goes to hell in the Lena River Site, where they've been stationed between deployments, just having returned from another assignment.

 

“Prep the American,” one man in a crisp suit orders, his teeth barred in disgust.

 

Yasha immediately lashes out. She does not know why, but makes no move until she is accosted and then enters the fray. She lasts all of twenty seconds against these men until she is subdued with an electrical impulse. Yasha’s left arm becomes dead weight and hangs heavy from his shoulder. He twists a knife from the man before him.

 

The warm press of a loaded gun against Natalia’s temple slows him.

 

Her body is still twitching with the after effects of the shock, but it is enough for them to roughly march them down the hall and into a surgical suite.

 

Before them is a chair which Yasha is moved to sit in, leather straps pulled tight against his hips and legs. They peel his tactical gear and shirt away from him, exposing the mark of her words on his arm, and the deep blue lettering that rests atop his heart, in English.

 

She’s motionless aside for the heavy movement of her breaths, and the beads of sweat that are rolling down her torso. She can read what they say and they most certainly do not say _Watch me_. Before she can be angry he is strapped fully into the chair and there is a bite guard in his mouth and a blowtorch in the hand of the nearest man.

 

There is the crackle of electricity as the machine above his head lights up. Then there is the sound of his screams and the smell of his flesh burning.

 

She does not scream. She does not cry.

 

She watches calmly as they wiped away all traces of Yasha. She watches them burn away her words. Looks upon his tense form in the chair as they ask for a report.

 

The charred flesh over his arm cracks and peels pink and new like baby skin, the skin over his chest stirs and heals, the words about rabbits and observations clinging to the muscle.

 

Something settles cold and wicked in the center of Natalia’s chest. A thing festering from the knowledge that your god isn’t real.

 

They wipe him until there is nothing but blackness in his eyes. He is cowed and obedient and it disgusts her. They lead him from the chair, address the fading burns and march him toward a tube in a corner.

 

Natalia watches as hoarfrost covers the outside of the metal coffin, sees the small look of familiar horror pass over his features before they too are icy blue and unmoving.

 

Now, she believes, is her turn. Instead of the chair she is thrust toward a metal exam table. Instead of the electricity they inject liquid fire into her blood. They place her in an unfamiliar room, with a cot she did not share with Yasha, that holds no memory of his scent, and leave her to burn.

 

\--

 

Approximately seventy-two hours have passed since the incident, her fever peaked after the eighth hour and subsided twelve hours ago. The residual stench of her own sweat makes her want to burn her clothing. The temperature outside of her room has remained the same, a gentle breeze of recycled air that bathed her with goosebumps.

 

Two men lead her down the corridor to their old briefing room. Inside there are a number of men in crisp suits, but not the one that had ordered Yasha to be contained.

 

They give her a new assignment, one she half listens to while she inspects and assembles her required weaponry: a pair of small arms, handguns of Austrian origins if Natalia is correct, a beautiful array of knives lain before her in neat rows, and judging by the size of the case, a sniper rifle.

 

She repeats the details back to the men before her, checking and loading additional cartridges as she sees fit. Once they have dismissed her, she calmly looks up, shoots the man at the other end of the table between the eyes.

 

Her hands do not shake as she kills every other man in the room. She feels cold within her soul, calculated and efficient. The room is a bloody mess when she is finished. But she takes care to check every body, retrieve every thrown knife, gently clean and stash on her person.

 

When she leaves she brings the rifle, she still has an assignment to complete.

 

\--

 

It’s not sloppy, but it’s a message. She does not quietly assassinate her target. Once in the chest, once in the head. It’s not in a public square as she would have liked, but her seemingly endless supply of patience is wearing thin.

 

She is quick to leave the city, she stays only a few hours, until the midday sun could reveal her location, and moves on out of the city, hitchhiking her way south toward Greece.

 

\--

 

She never makes it to the Mediterranean, choosing to give Istanbul a wide berth and passes closer to the Black Sea alternating between walking and riding until she steals a motorcycle in Katsamonu. She has never driven one, but is a quick study.

 

It is during this time of solitude that she can fully examine the changes that she had unknowingly undergone. She can tell the time of the day, not just by the sun, but consciously knows how long it takes her to perform a task, and how long she has been asleep. She discovers she needs less sleep than she ever had, and spends the additional time awake picking what pockets she can and reading the people she sees in the cities. She finds out that she’s stronger, she logically knows that additional four-point-three kilos of the Dragunov should train her to the weight, but after she has had to carry the bike over a fallen tree on the unnamed mountain road (and subsequently moved the tree off of it), she knows that her strength has somehow be increased.

 

One week later she realizes that she’s being followed.

 

\---

 

Natalia becomes aware of a dull throb under her left thigh holster hours before she’s due to stop. It pulses and aches and she does her best to ignore the sensation as she catalogue the types of injuries that she knows could cause this; her knowledge is limited and the list is short. She distracts herself instead by reviewing what she knows of her tail. Male, mid twenties to early thirties, blonde. American military trained, most likely a marksman, if he was a sniper she would have expected him to haves eliminated her already if it was his mission; and he has been following her for much longer than she had noticed.

 

She broke pattern, stole a rich man’s credit card and booked a room for the night. She took a long bath, inspecting the words that wrapped around her thigh with a darkness swirling around her deadened heart. Bitterness sat heavy in the back of the throat as she wrapped herself in a towel and moved back into the main suite, redressing in her tactical gear.

 

The phone rang inside the suite, on the desk across from the bed. She let it buzz nosily for seconds before it stopped. She folded her towel neatly on the counter in the bathroom and heard the phone ring again.

 

She looks out at the buildings across the way, thinks (knows) she sees a glint of metal reflecting off of the cities lights and moves.

\---

 

He finds her in a church in Budapest. It’s some ungodly hour in the middle of the night and only the prayer candles cast flickering light near the alter.

 

She’d heard his silent approach and she was unsure if he would shoot first or attack.

 

“ **You’ve got two options here lady. 1. You can come with me, stop fucking killing people, go straight and help stop other people like you, or 2. I can put an arrow through your throat. Your call.** ”

 

Her smile is a feral snarl when she turns to face him, raising her head to give him the open shot at her throat, “ **Take your best shot.** ”

**Author's Note:**

> So this feels a little selfish, that I really pushed for the end of this today because I finally figured out how to end the trilogy and part of me is really glad that I've got it figured out and the other part of me is absolutely sick that this is how I'm ending it. Part Three will be uploaded tomorrow.


End file.
